Minimalist Balance Mod?

[Kuro]

Just make Espionage checkable on/off and work. There, issue solved for a minimalist mod.

[Krill]

TMIT:

One pre-bio farm can feed 2 grassland workshops pre-SP.

That's just wrong. You're also forgetting that a grass cottage makes 2 fpt, whereas the spec doesn't. I think all of the comparisons your using between tiles, improvements and specs just aren't realistic.

[darrelljs]

I'm pretty sure a mature CE with the right civics and Mining, Inc. + Cereal Mills/Sid's Sushi is going to outproduce a Soviet econ with the exact same land. The question is does the opportunity cost of maturing the cottages and spreading the corporation have a short enough payback horizon to win out. The answer is, it depends. Outside of Sid's on a water map, I don't see the need to ban corporations.

I am with T-Hawk though, Spies are a boring pain in the ass and should be banned on general principle .

Darrell

[Serdoa]

I know I cannot add anything worthwhile to this discussion but as I never understood it and you guys are talking about it anyway:

Why does a non-riverside, non-financial cottage equal a spec in 70 turns? Of course, the raw commerce-output will be the same, but the cottage will have produced 140 food more, whereas the spec will have produced 210 GPP. If I go to the point where I don't have more food produced then needed, then I think I'd rather need to compare

spec: 3 people - 2 on grassland farm (3/0/0), 1 spec = total output: 6/0/3
cottage: 3 people - 3 on grassland cottages (2/0/1) = total output: 6/0/3

and thats even before the cottages grow. I guess I make an error somewhere thinking about that, but I can't find it, so could one of you please help me understand that?

[Krill]

Well, there is the commerce gained by the cottage during the growth to 3 population, as well as the cottage growth, and that the farm grows population faster. It assumes that you have 2 grasslands to farm, which might not be the case early on pre-CS (which is one of the reasons cottages get grown early, there isn't anything else to work and and you don't want to slave anything just yet), and it ignores that the 3 cottages take 2 extra worker turns (but then you need to take into account worker movement anyway).

[darrelljs]

The thing with Farms is flexibility. They can be used to drive commerce or production in the early game. Of course, the commerce potential is diminished in <Immortal SP or MP, because you can't leverage GPP into multiple techs. But for high level SP play, Farms are the premier flat tile improvement. This is just about my favorite Unconquered Sun post. Funny, I didn't realize it was TMIT that spawned it .

Darrell

[TheMeInTeam]

That's just wrong. You're also forgetting that a grass cottage makes 2 fpt, whereas the spec doesn't. I think all of the comparisons your using between tiles, improvements and specs just aren't realistic.

Cottage is food neutral. Workshops are -1 food. I'm not sure what the difficulty here is. It's like saying a workshop or a grassland hill mine "makes" 1 food/turn. That's just silly...what we care about is the yield of the tile after the cost of both growing onto it and working it (for example it's been mathematically proven that the best way to set up a cottage city with infinite worker turns is to farm it all, let it grow to cap, then switch improvements...that just doesn't happen in practice because worker turns are far more scarce than that).

You even have tile efficiency vs pop efficiency considerations; cottages are more pop efficient while farms/specs are more tile efficient. That factors into empire plans as well.

I thought the tradeoffs between cottages and other tile improvements obvious to most veteran players...towns are really good with the right civics but they take a long time where they're a liability in opportunity cost, making for some strategy in their use (although they're consistently excellent in bureaucracy cities).

and thats even before the cottages grow. I guess I make an error somewhere thinking about that, but I can't find it, so could one of you please help me understand that?

2 major considerations here:

1. Happy cap. Any reasonable early city will have a bonus food resource and can grow easily.
2. If you want production, you farm + whip (or work mines as available). If you want research, you either use the farms for specs or you cottage.

The 70 turn thing is assuming you are cap limited...which is frequently the case in the early goings. If it isn't, you can definitely consider spamming cottages everywhere, but unless everyone else is also not cap limited you're going to win no matter what if you play well otherwise. While capped surplus food gets dumped into...well whips.

You can, of course, use units to grow under monarchy, but the maintenance cost on units makes the cottages pretty unattractive w/o their riverside (not to mention cost of growth, and cost of worker turns to improve extra tiles at this point). The alternative is drama + culture slider but that's not very commerce-friendly of course.

Now an interesting point is how games usually transpire here. Usually players are allowed to freely expand into what would otherwise be a tremendous amount of land for a given map size...and to bankroll it does require some commerce and alteration of strategy. If the land has literally no rivers at all some non-riverside cottages might be necessary, and it's true that on some earlygame cities you simply have a good bonus resource and not many other good tiles that can be farmed/mined...cottages can make sense there too.

We can convolute this discussion further (how fun ). Things like farms and mines can transfer outputs in cities w/o multipliers partially to cities that have them (bur cap) through build wealth or spec output. Even w/o trades, you get at least 1500 per GS bulb usually..

Want to convolute it even further? Now we factor in the rate at which we reach key techs (currency, civil service, education, or whatever else) under each approach. This actually isn't an easy thing to quantify at all, but the fact of the matter is that cottages are not the end-all-be-all and their tradeoffs must be carefully examined before one goes plopping them down a lot.

[T-hawk]

I think, however, for a minimalist mod that they're not something that should be banned because players might prefer them available on occasion.

Good point, I forgot what thread we were in.

Just make Espionage checkable on/off and work. There, issue solved for a minimalist mod.

We did exactly that for the RB balance mod, of course.

You even have tile efficiency vs pop efficiency considerations; cottages are more pop efficient while farms/specs are more tile efficient.

How's that last? Even with Biology, it takes one farmed grassland to support one specialist. Same tile efficiency as a cottage/town, no?

the maintenance cost on units makes the cottages pretty unattractive w/o their riverside ... If the land has literally no rivers at all some non-riverside cottages might be necessary

I see this come up sometimes, the perception that riverside tiles work well with cottages. That's not really true; you get the 1 commerce regardless of what improvement is on the tile. There's no particular synergy between cottages and rivers except with Financial, and even there it is small, all you get is a total of 10 extra commerce until the hamlet would kick in the Fin bonus anyway.

[darrelljs]

. One pre-bio farm can feed 2 grassland workshops pre-SP.

Workshops are -1 food.

Darrell

[Krill]

Now an interesting point is how games usually transpire here. Usually players are allowed to freely expand into what would otherwise be a tremendous amount of land for a given map size...and to bankroll it does require some commerce and alteration of strategy. If the land has literally no rivers at all some non-riverside cottages might be necessary, and it's true that on some earlygame cities you simply have a good bonus resource and not many other good tiles that can be farmed/mined...cottages can make sense there too.

This is the crux of the matter. There isn't an efficient way to stop someone from growing without hurting your own expansion - it's one of the reasons EXP works so well. On the issue of happy cap constraints, we do generally have a few happy res scattered around the map so you aren't stuck at size 5 cities come t120. I think the last game that was severely constrained in this manner was PB3? And that was with low food, high tech and expansion costs.

To tie this back into corps, the output doesn't necessarily only need to be moderated via the amount of resources on the map, but also by a gold cost per resource created. And towns are the reference point to do that.